


Cold Sharp Fingernails

by jpnadia



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Blood, F/F, Ghost Sex, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Masturbation, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:34:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23093407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jpnadia/pseuds/jpnadia
Summary: “How do you even get off here? I mean, I’ve been in some gnarly places, but this room really sucks.”“Excuse me?” asked Harrow, frosty as the air outside her blankets. She knew Gideon was being offensive, but she didn’t know exactly how.Harrow learns about masturbation and uses it as self-harm.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 7
Kudos: 112





	Cold Sharp Fingernails

**Author's Note:**

> In which Harrow fails to understand masturbation is supposed to feel good. (Later, Gideon helps her learn.)
> 
> I tagged for violence. It's all self-inflicted, but I feel like that counts. I'd rather tag too much than too little; let me know if I missed any, please.
> 
> Stay safe out there. <3

Harrow’s muscles ached. She’d exhausted herself, but Gideon had told her she would have to lift weights for the next myriad, and she found she could not deny this, one of last requests Gideon had ever made of her before she’d died. She would train, and by God, she would even sleep sometimes, when she could, all in memory of her vassal, her only friend, the woman she could not save.

It was cold-- both the sweat frosting over on her body and her empty heart. She hadn’t known this would happen when she’d ripped Gideon’s soul back out of her body, when she’d set it free in the vain hope that somehow this would give Gideon back to herself, even if Harrow would never see her again. Now she was useless, to both Gideon and the Emperor.

There was only one path, and that was forward. Harrow took it, and flopped onto the hard pallet, drawing the covers around herself in a half-hearted attempt to chase away the cold that never quite left. Her eyes drooped: it was a small mercy that physical exertion let her drop into sleep without reliving her sins.

“God, Nonagesimus, how do you get comfortable in this thing?”

“Gideon?” Harrow sat bolt upright, suddenly and thoroughly awake. Her voice echoed in the pitch black, off the metal walls of her empty room. 

"No, this is your afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus's Top Nerd Facts," said Gideon. There was a sensation of fidgeting around Harrow's elbow, even though the pallet contained only Harrow and her nest of covers.

Harrow relaxed. "Griddle, you wouldn't know a nerd fact if it bit you on the nose."

"That's because I'm not a nerd, nerd," said Gideon. There were several blissful moments of companionable silence before Gideon ruined it by speaking again. 

“How do you even get off here? I mean, I’ve been in some gnarly places, but this room really sucks.”

“Excuse me?” asked Harrow, frosty as the air outside her blankets. She knew Gideon was being offensive, but she didn’t know exactly how. It was a comfort and an affront at once.

Gideon was smirking. Harrow could taste it, could smell a snarky explanation in the still air of the room.

She cut it off. "How are you here?"

The smirking sensation faded, replaced with a thoughtful pause that would never have happened when Gideon was alive.

"I don't think I can tell you that," Gideon said at last.

Harrow wanted to press, wanted to tell Gideon how glad she was that she hadn't destroyed her soul when she'd ripped it free, wanted to ask how long Gideon could stay. She didn't dare do any of those things, in case even voicing the question made Gideon disappear.

The exhaustion rose again. 

"You need to get more sleep," said Gideon, eventually.

"I am trying," Harrow told her stiffly. Her limbs felt warm and heavy. "There's so much to do."

When she woke up, Gideon was gone.

***

That night, Harrow went to her empty room, and it stayed empty.

She drew blanket after blanket over her shivering body.

This was rest, or what passed for it in the Emperor's service. There was nowhere more comfortable available; if there had been, Harrow would have had to fight Ianthe for it, and lately, Harrow had not had the energy.

She had to believe that Gideon would come back. 

***

She had not availed herself of the Emperor’s libraries before. She had not seen the point. But Harrowhark Nonagesimus refused to let Gideon Nav understand anything that she, Harrow, did not, so she went to the books.

In the end, the answer was so simple Harrowhark felt silly. Gideon was referring to masturbation, an activity that Harrow had read about exactly once, tried furtively, and decided it was a waste of time. Perhaps it was time to revisit it, in Gideon's memory.

It didn't take so much doing to find what Gideon might call "works of a titty nature", not in an empire that could afford to throw nothing away. If nothing else, they were an education in what other people thought about. Harrowhark realized that none of these did anything for her. There was, occasionally, the thought of red hair and gold eyes that brought warmth to her bones, all of them, but she did not like those thoughts. They hurt too much.

Or maybe that was what Gideon had meant. That she wanted Harrow to hurt.

Experimentally, Harrow reached between her legs. There was sensation where she touched. Nerves fired. Harrow had gleaned from the literature that there ought to be pleasure, though, and there was none.

Pleasure was mastering a new necromantic theorem. Pleasure was solving a puzzle first of anyone. Pleasure was winning.

Here, alone in her icy bedroom, there was no one to best. The touch left her cold.

She dug her nails into the flesh of her thighs, and that wasn't pleasure, either, but the sensation sparkled like a needle right before Harrow plunged it into her flesh. It had never occurred to Harrow to seek that sensation for its own sake. She sought it now.

It was still not as good as the days when she outwitted Gideon three times a month, ruled the sad remains of her house with all the panache her teenaged self had been able to muster, filled the pews with skeletons to make up the numbers. There had been enough breath even on the Ninth that Harrow could pretend she was not alone.

Here, the only breath was her own. She could never forget that, not even when she learned how to file her nails sharp so that the marks they made would scab over and last. She touched herself and let the blood bead, nipples and belly and labia and thighs.

This was hardly worse than what she did to herself every day when she practiced necromancy, and it hurt so much better.

Through practice, she learned that if she pinched and scratched these tender areas of her body, she could build an unfamiliar tension in the environs of her pelvis. If she persisted, the tension would release in seismic tremors, like water bursting out of a filled membrane, washing away the tension and leaving only its bloody wreckage behind.

Most improbably, Gideon had been right. The sensation calmed her, smoothed over the worst of her rough edges. She found she could sleep again, and with sleep came clarity that she had forgotten existed.

When the emperor called her again, she would be ready.

***

Gideon called on her first. Harrow wasn't sure if she was dreaming or hallucinating, and decided she didn't care when Gideon’s warm weight settled into the pallet against her.

She pinched herself anyway. She felt sensation, but not pain. Nothing hurt, not anymore, not like losing Gideon had hurt.

"What the fuck, Nonagesimus," said Gideon. It felt like she was slotting her body against Harrow's, naked skin against the illusion of skin.

Harrow hesitated, uncertain. "You said-- it's relaxing." She found she couldn't use the words that Gideon used, not alone in that horrible cold room.

"Can I-- show you?" 

"If you must."

Harrow didn't know what she expected, not when they only had one living body between them, but Gideon touched her then, her warm callused palm covering the crescent moon scabs that spiraled around her breast to the nipple.

It wasn’t the first time Harrow had thought about Gideon touching her. She had never imagined it would be gentle.

She shied away, unaccountably frightened.

Presently Gideon said, "We don't have to," which perversely was the only thing she could have said to resolve Harrow's uncertainty.

"It's fine," said Harrow, and apparently they hadn't spent seventeen years fighting in Drearburh for nothing, because Gideon understood her, despite all the time that had passed in the trials and the death and the training. Drearburh felt like another lifetime.

Having Gideon close, even only her soul, was strange.

Harrow didn't understand how this worked, how Gideon could make Harrow feel the warm bulk of cavalier muscles when that body had been lost. She didn't dare question it. This was too precious to risk.

Gideon smoothed her fingers over the scabs, soothed the angry red flesh that surrounded the punctures. Closing her eyes, Harrow tipped her head back and shifted to give her access. She did not deserve this comfort. Cravenly, she prayed it would not stop, that this would not be yanked away from her.

When Gideon's hand dipped between Harrow's thighs, her fingers slid easily over slick flesh. Humiliatingly, Harrow arched into the touch. This wasn't pleasure, either-- or if it was, Harrow would have to revisit five years’ worth of wordless yearning. Her new muscles tensed.

"At least you've been lifting weights," Gideon said, grudgingly, and curled her fingers.

All of Harrow's new muscles jumped. 

"Is that all right?" 

Harrow had no idea if it was all right. All she knew was that Gideon had her fingers inside her, and her hips kept moving, and she had the horrible suspicion that this was affection.

Harrow did not know what to do with affection. "If you stop doing that, I will find your body and chain it to the back of this ship and use your bones to fight the horde until your corpse is nothing but space dust and of no use to anyone, least of all you.”

Gideon laughed next to her ear, low and pleased, and she did not stop, not when Harrow’s body quivered under her and then quivered again.

Every sensation went from sharp to soft, fuzzy around the edges like a necromancer’s vision right before she fainted of blood loss.

“Sleep,” suggested Gideon, some time later.

“You’ll be gone when I wake.” That was contemptibly weak. Harrow didn’t need Gideon, except that she did.

“I have to go anyway.” The weight had gone, and Harrow wanted to reach out and cling, but sleep had settled heavy over her.

***

The next morning, Harrowhark cut her nails.


End file.
